If you thought that a contemporary drama about forcible repatriation, set in an Immigration removal centre, would be about the plight of those confined in places like the infamous Yarl’s Wood, in Removal Men writers MJ Harding and Jay Miller give us something unexpected.Instead of the place's inmates, their play concentrates on what it might be like to work in such an environment. Its origins came when Harding – a founder of the band Fat White Family, sharing composer credits with Jonah Brody – became involved with an intervention to prevent the deportation of a detainee at Yarl’s Wood. He Read more ...

David Troughton (b.1950), a familiar face on television and a Royal Shakespeare Company veteran, is a versatile actor. His most recent RSC appearance before Gloucester displayed his talent for comedy: he was a funny and energetic Simon Eyre in Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday in his favourite theatre, the Swan at Stratford. Previous roles for the company have included Kent in an earlier Lear with John Wood as the king, Bolingbrooke in Richard II and the title roles in Richard III and Henry IV, parts 1 and 2.Earlier this year, in the West End and on tour, he played the eccentric, reclusive Tom Read more ...

When David Bowie first met with the producer Robert Fox to discuss Lazarus back in 2013, you now have to wonder if he was seriously contemplating his own mortality. The clue, of course, lies in the title, and that of Bowie's extraordinary last album, Blackstar. In what is effectively a sequel to the Walter Tevis novel The Man Who Fell to Earth – memorably filmed by Nicholas Roeg with Bowie as the marooned alien Thomas Newton – Lazarus is awash with intimations of death, of decay, of a world on the brink of extinction.Enda Walsh's book is full of longing – for love, for peace, Read more ...

With the Bush Theatre’s main building undergoing renovations, this company’s shows are being staged in a selection of temporary spaces in West London. So, on this dark and freezing evening, I make my way to The Tabernacle, a Grade II-listed building in Powis Square, Notting Hill. It was once a church and is now a community centre. In the 1990s, the North Kensington Sports Academy trained young boxers here, so it’s a particularly apt venue for this restaging of American playwright Marco Orange-Is-the-New-Black Ramirez’s 2015 Bush-hit The Royale, a drama about this bloody sport.If storm clouds Read more ...

“Britain is a world by itself.” It could be the slogan of the year – and rather longer, probably – but the phrase comes from Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline. Its Act III scene, in which Britain announces that it is breaking its allegiances to the Roman Empire, surely can’t ever have played before with quite the nuance that Melly Still’s RSC production gives it. It premiered at Stratford in May, when the big Brexit question was still open, and now reaches the Barbican with redoubled relevance.Back in 1609, Britishness was the issue, too, but coming from the opposite direction: James Read more ...

What would a Trump follower make of a successful businessman who grew his company on the proceeds of a negligent decision, and then topped himself because of a belated sense of responsibility? What a dumbass! He wouldn’t be about to become President of the United States, for sure. He’ll be paying his taxes next!Such changes in public morality are the reason why “classic” plays need reviving from time to time. Arthur Miller’s All My Sons – his first success, toiled at throughout World War Two – is a scrupulously hardworking American family drama about two men in partnership in a small aircraft Read more ...

The signs were there early in Glenda Jackson's career that she would one day have what it takes to "ascend the Everest" (as the cliché has it) of Lear. So powerful was her performance as Ophelia in Peter Hall's production of Hamlet in 1965 that there was talk afterwards of her being cast as the prince himself. Two years later she was another disturbed woman playing Charlotte Corday unforgettably whipping Marat with her hair in The Marat/Sade. Uncompromising directness, a febrile, earthy authority and a strong, resonant, slightly nasal voice characterised these performances.She went on to Read more ...

Following no less than three smash-hit, sell-out runs in London and at the Edinburgh Fringe, the King’s Head Theatre production of Joe DiPietro’s Fucking Men, or F*cking Men (as the publicity calls it), now transfers to The Vaults Theatre in Waterloo for a five-week run. It’s clearly been around long enough to attract attention. But, apart from the shocking name, what’s it all about? Well, the title speaks volumes actually, because the play is based on the daisy-chain sexual encounters of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1900 classic, La Ronde, except that here the action is transposed onto the gay Read more ...

Terry Johnson's Dead Funny debuted at the same theatre in the West End in 1994 (after opening at Hampstead), and its starting point is the real events of April 1992 when two funnymen, Frankie Howerd and Benny Hill, died in the same week. It was a bizarre coincidence from which he fashioned a very funny play – which he now expertly directs in this welcome revival – about the Dead Funny Society, a collection of suburban oddballs who meet to celebrate their comedy heroes.But underneath the laughter there is pain. Eleanor (Katherine Parkinson) yearns to be a mother, but husband Richard (Rufus Read more ...

From Monteverdi to Schubert to Bernstein and Lloyd Webber the dramatic song cycle has travelled far and wide over the centuries, though not until Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years in opposite directions. His two-handed tour-de-force – first seen Off Broadway in 2002 – shadows Cathy (Samantha Barks, who was Eponine in the film of Les Mis) and Jamie (Jonathan Bailey) as they find and lose each other at a time when both are seeking recognition in their creative lives.He is a writer, she an actress; his timeline moves forwards, hers backwards. They meet only once. But as one moves Read more ...

Who is the fool in Sam Shepard’s 1983 chamber play Fool for Love? Is it Eddie, the rodeo stuntman who repeatedly cheats on his girl? Is it May, the girl who keeps taking him back? Or is it the Old Man, whose philosophy of rolling-stone fatherhood fails to take account of the damaged lives?You emerge from Simon Evans’ production, his third and last at the atmospheric West End pop-up Found111, wondering whether Shepard might not be taking the audience for fools too. So you thought love was simple, he mocks. You thought love was a wholesome thing that sets people straight. Well, get this.The Read more ...

Composer Henry Krieger’s highly anticipated Dreamgirls arrives later this month, but first up is the UK premiere of his less well-known but thoroughly likeable Side Show, based on the real story of a pair of conjoined twins who became 1930s American vaudeville stars.Daisy and Violet Hilton have spent their lives on display, from the abusive midwife who charged punters to peer at them in the back room of a pub to the autocratic guardian who makes them the star attraction in his travelling sideshow. Now, they’re seeking autonomy, but disagree on the form that should take: Daisy wants fame and Read more ...